by Jon Land
“Where are you, Kimberlain? Come out, or I’ll kill him! Kimberlain!”
Parents covered their children along the sandy beach at the water’s edge. Others were crouched behind the cover of boats or shrubs. Cries of fear mixed with the chirping of crickets.
Hedda steadied her shotgun. Was this what Tiny Tim wanted her to do? A second boy lost to her bullet. Her son this time, maybe her son …
“Kimberlain!”
The Ferryman emerged from the woods on Tiny Tim’s other flank, shotgun held before him.
“Drop it or I kill him!”
Kimberlain dropped the shotgun at his feet. Tiny Tim smiled at him through his charred and blackened face. The left side was raw and blistered, making him seem even more grotesque.
Hedda slid out of the woods and crept along the tree line.
Seckle moved the gun away from the boy’s head and started it toward Kimberlain.
“Good,” he said hoarsely. “Good.”
As Tiny Tim brought the Uzi in line with the Ferryman’s face, Hedda dashed forward. She grasped the boy and yanked him from Seckle’s hold in the same instant he spun toward her. She covered the boy with her body as they both hit the ground. A volley of gunshots found her ears just ahead of the burst of pain exploding through her spine. The pain became pins and needles, and she gasped, heaving for breath.
Kimberlain dove for his shotgun and rolled, firing in the same motion. The pellets grazed Tiny Tim’s side and he twisted away screaming, another shotgun blast barely missing him as he charged back into the woods leading up from the waterfront.
He had shot the woman, but Kimberlain was on his trail. He was running through the woods now, the uphill grade paining him. Branches scraped at his face, but Seckle felt nothing. He emerged in an open grove where wood benches had been laid out in circular fashion around a camp fire. Above him up a slight rise was the southern cluster of cabins, and beyond that the deep woods and escape.
Kimberlain had stopped over Hedda only briefly. He eased her onto her back, and blood instantly began to soak out of her wounds into the ground. Then he helped the boy whose life she had saved to his feet. The boy was standing limply, shock having overtaken him. An old couple rushed forward in their nightclothes and took the boy in their arms—his grandparents, obviously.
“Thank God,” they muttered. “Thank God, thank God… .”
They were starting to speak to him when Kimberlain knelt down next to Hedda. Her face was ghastly pale. Her lips trembled. Her eyes were dying.
“I saved him,” she moaned, “didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
Kimberlain saw her try to smile. Then her eyes reached up and held his.
“Get Seckle, Ferryman. Get him.”
“Don’t worry,” Kimberlain promised, but Hedda’s eyes had already locked open and sightless. He lowered his hand to close them and then bounded to his feet, rage filling him.
Wop-wop-wop-wop-wop …
The Ferryman was halfway up one of the dirt roads leading up from the waterfront when he heard the sound. He recognized it instantly and gazed up. Out of the darkness, a single floodlight over the lake broke the storm’s control of the night.
Kimberlain caught sight of Seckle’s massive shape struggling up the hill to the southern rim of cabins just as the helicopter began to descend. Its backdraft tore the ground out from under his feet before he could pull the trigger. Instantly automatic fire sprayed his way from within the chopper and chewed up the earth around him. Kimberlain waited until the helicopter banked into a rise again before breaking into a fresh sprint in Tiny Tim’s path. But another barrage traced his movements, and only a leap behind one of the cabins prevented him from being shot.
By the time he crept around the cabin’s front, the chopper was hovering over Garth Seckle. A rope ladder had already been lowered, and someone was gesturing for the monster to take it.
Kimberlain had four shells left, and he fired them all in the time it took Tiny Tim to grasp the rope and be lifted away. The storm, though, swallowed his shells, as the helicopter cut its floodlight and disappeared into the blackness.
The Ninth Dominion
TD-13
Saturday, August 22; 9:00 A.M.
Chapter 36
“IT’S A PLEASURE to meet you at last, Winston.”
Peet sat in the center of the small, locked room. All the furniture had been removed prior to his being escorted into it. The room was empty, barren. The only evidence it had ever been occupied showed in the discolored patches on the floor where furniture had once been.
“We still haven’t met, Leeds,” Peet said without gazing at the camera over the door.
“Our spirits have. Years ago, perhaps even long, long before.”
“You should have left me alone.”
“As the Ferryman should have. Alas, we were engaged in a battle for your very soul. And I won.”
“I own my soul.”
“But you cast it with my lot. You would have chosen death, unless you truly wanted to be here by my side.”
“To join you, you think?”
“To merely be as you are. And that, my friend, is with me. I do not seek to change you, Winston. I want you with me in your true light as we embark on a special mission to create a world you were born to live in.”
“The ninth dominion …”
“Yes,” Leeds said, surprise lacing his voice. “I see Kimberlain shared his discoveries with you.”
“He will be coming, Leeds.”
“I am expecting him. I thought you would want the pleasure of arranging his demise. A fitting finish to the circle, don’t you think? So that a new one may begin.”
“There is only one circle, Leeds, and it is continuous. To live is to be born not once, but every minute. Death happens only when birth stops.”
“And it is time for you to be bom again.”
“In here?”
“Not at all.”
Peet heard a click, and then the door before him began to open.
“I knew you’d be going to ground,” Kimberlain told Captain Seven as he took the last few steps down into what might have been a massive gopher hole in the middle of rural Connecticut. “But I didn’t realize you’d be doing it literally.”
Captain Seven was there waiting for him at the bottom of the entry tunnel.
“It ain’t much,” he said as they stepped into a neat, square room. “And I don’t even call it home. Can’t even smoke my dope because the ventilation ain’t adequate. This hasn’t been easy, let me tell you.”
“I was about to compliment you on the architecture,” the Ferryman told him.
“Gaw ’head. Only thing worthwhile I stole from the gooks. Those fucking tunnels they had built underneath the whole country were masterpieces of construction. Even frags wouldn’t shake the walls sometimes. Made a detailed study one day and brought the plans back with me.” Captain Seven tapped his skull. “Up here. Lucky thing, too, since we might be spending considerable time here in the future.” He lowered his voice. “Sorry about the way things turned out in Pennsylvania.”
“Glad you finally became reachable again.”
The captain had taken off as soon as the news of the attack on Lauren Talley and the alleged perpetrator reached him. He knew it could only mean that anyone close to Kimberlain was getting squeezed, and if Leeds could find Peet, Seven’s railroad cars wouldn’t elude the madman long.
“How’s Talley?” Kimberlain asked him.
“Surviving, like the rest of us. Maybe a little better.”
“That’s something.”
“You want to tell me more about Pennsylvania?”
“Later.”
It still hurt Kimberlain too much to relive what had happened at the Towanda Family Resort. Hedda—his sister—was dead, but somehow he felt that was what she wanted. In at last discovering her true self, she had found there was nothing left to go back to. The existence of a son she could never know underscored the bleakness an
d futility. Getting her life back so quickly was like living the worst of it all over again. No way she could see it getting better. No way it could. At first he thought she believed the boy whose life she had saved in the end at the resort’s waterfront was indeed her son’s. On the way to Captain Seven’s, though, he realized she knew it wasn’t and didn’t care. It might as well have been, because he was a stranger to her as well. It made no difference. That’s what she had come to grips with, but the pain of it all must have hurt her as much as the bullets that had punctured her spine.
For his part, Kimberlain could still not manage a firm grasp on his own emotions. The past twenty-four hours had cast his entire life in a new light: a murkier, darker light that left him feeling his way without direction. He had lost his parents to a set of conspiratorial manipulations, and now he had lost his sister to the mad manipulations of a single man.
But it wasn’t really his sister, was it? His sister had perished on that island to Leeds’s reconditioning process, and somehow that made things worse. It nagged at him like a cut that wouldn’t heal, and Kimberlain knew the only way to close it was to destroy what she had been meant to be a part of.
“Right now, I want to hear about TD-13,” he said to Captain Seven.
“Bad news, boss. We’re talking big time. This guy’s even better than you thought.”
“Let’s have it, Captain.”
“Okay. We got Briarwood Industries—your buddy Leeds—buying out PLAS-TECH right before the company wins a government contract to manufacture a certain monofilament strip. Once completed, these strips are shipped to three paper mills as part of the same government contract.”
“To produce what?”
“Money, Ferryman. Cash money.”
“As in dollar bills?”
“And fives, tens, twenties, and everything else. Currency, Ferryman. That’s where Leeds has placed his TD-13, and that’s how he’s going to poison the country. Care to see how it works, up close and personal?”
“I think so.”
“Right this way, Ferryman,” Captain Seven beckoned. “Class is in session.”
He led him through the well-appointed underground bunker, which virtually mirrored his train car. On a black table, covered by a glass dome, he had laid out a series of brand-new ten-dollar bills.
“I got these from the Federal Reserve Bank up in Boston. Not for general circulation yet, but a friend of mine took care of things. Part of the latest shipment out of a spanking new minting facility in Kansas. There’s a plan to replace all the cash in this country with fresh currency.”
“What?” the Ferryman asked.
“You heard right. Bear with me now, because here’s where things get a little complicated.” Captain Seven circled the dome containing the enclosed money as he continued. “Know what the biggest problem facing the treasury today is?”
“Off the top of my head I’d have to say cash hoarded for use by drug syndicates.”
“Nope, not even close. The biggest problem, especially in the not-so-distant future, is counterfeiting. See, the next generation of laser copiers and printers is due out inside of two years, and they can make money even the banks would accept for deposit. So some bozo in the D of C figures we better come up with a simple way of identifying the real thing.”
“The plastic strips …”
“Abso-fucking-lutely. Based on an idea the Canadians used with their funny money. They put a kind of hologram in theirs. I think it’s a naked broad but I’m not sure. Well, a hologram wouldn’t work in ours because the paper’s thicker, but a strip formed of monofilament mesh fibers would work just fine. Hold it up to any light and you see a pattern that looks like a tick-tack-toe board. No way to reproduce that with any generation of copiers coming in our lifetime.” Captain Seven took a deep breath. “So PLAS-TECH makes the strips and ships them to these paper plants.”
“Who, in turn, insert the strips into the huge rolls of paper that are then sent on to the Kansas Depository where all the new money is bring printed. But replacing all the cash out there now will take years.”
Captain Seven shook his head. “Nope. Government has a plan to get all the old money out of circulation in less than six months, starting at the beginning of September.”
“What’d you find out about T. Howard Briarwood?” Kimberlain asked, changing the subject.
“Would you believe he owns the Gerabaldi Scrap Yard in upstate New York where you mixed it up with those nasty machines?”
Kimberlain didn’t bother to answer.
“You think that’s good?” Captain Seven resumed. “Shit, it gets better. Let’s talk Briarwood Industries, Ferryman, which happens to be the largest privately held conglomerate in the world, owned and operated by the Howard Hughes of the nineties, T. Howard Briarwood. Fucking recluse runs everything from a bunch of private offices all over the country outfitted with tech stuff that’d make me proud. Doesn’t like people much, by all accounts.”
“I can understand why now.”
“Yeah, well check this out. In the just over two months Andrew Harrison Leeds was in The Locks, T. Howard Briarwood wasn’t seen in public once. Another one of his reclusive stages, his people called it. Care to guess what some of his other reclusive stages corresponded to?”
“Murders committed by Leeds in one of his other identities,” Kimberlain responded.
“You get an A for the day, boss. The scary thing is that this guy really is a fucking genius.” Captain Seven cast his eyes admiringly on the ten-dollar bills laid out inside the glass dome. “Behold a masterpiece of modern science, as good as anything I could do myself, and that’s saying a lot. You said the guy who created this TD-13 claimed he didn’t produce all that much. Well, since money is handled by so many people during the course of its paper life, he wouldn’t have to.”
“The poison won’t lose its potency?” Kimberlain wondered.
“Sure it will—long after everyone is too dead to use it. See Leeds’s people—Briarwood’s people—took the TD-13 and microencapsulated it prior to adding it to PLAS-TECH’s strips.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the toxin will lie dormant until a certain set of circumstances are met. You got a dollar?”
Kimberlain handed him a twenty.
“To put it in your wallet or pocket, you gotta fold it first, right? Well, soon as you do that the encapsulation breaks and the poison is released. I’d say each bill’s got a life span of a hundred owners or two months, whichever comes first.”
“And which would?”
“The hundred owners, almost for sure.”
“And just how many individual bills are we talking about?”
“In a normal year, the Treasury Department replaces fifty million pieces of currency. You can multiply that by ten or twenty in the case of what’s already been minted in Kansas.”
“Past tense, Captain?”
“From what I’ve been able to gather, they’re just waiting to ship the new currency en masse to Federal Reserve distributor banks on September 1.” Captain Seven tapped the glass dome. “These are parts of an advance shipment to banks to make sure things get off to a smooth start. I gave them the full treatment. Great stuff, let me tell you. This TD-13 is a slow-acting, progressive nerve poison. Works on the internal organs until they just shut down. By the time anyone figures out what’s going on, it’s too late.”
“But the bills aren’t available to the public yet.”
“No. Instructions pertaining to that release date have been very precise.”
“So the money gets distributed,” Kimberlain concluded, “and whoever touches it gets infected by TD-13. What about people they go on to touch? Can it be spread that way, too?”
“Nope. This is a toxin, not a bacteria or a virus. And the way my simple mind has figured things, it’s plenty bad enough on its own. Say a month at most before the entire country’s been poisoned.”
A chill crept up Kimberlain’s spine as he moved away from the
dome. “No, Captain, not the whole country. Not everyone touches money. Convicts and prisoners don’t. Inmates in mental institutions and asylums don’t.”
“Right on, boss.”
“The ninth dominion,” Kimberlain said, “just like Leeds ordered it. A world left for the mad, the depraved, and the criminals, thanks to these new bills stockpiled at the Kansas Depository.”
“I’d say less than five percent have been shipped so far.”
“Makes it pretty clear what’s got to be done,” Kimberlain concluded.
“Already got the stuff brewing you’ll need to pull it off. Delicate process. Got to give it time. Miss the proper temperature by a degree or two and the rats’ll be eating our guts for breakfast.”
“I blow myself up, or something along that line, you better be ready to call in your favors.”
“I got numbers from the old days. They’ll just love to hear from me again.”
“Do you remember me?” Andrew Harrison Leeds asked the massive figure chained to the hospital cot.
Garth Seckle was still in the process of coming awake. “Should I?” It hurt him to talk through his burned, scabbed lips.
“I should say so. We’re brothers, you and I. I’ve been behind you every step of the way.”
Seckle’s stare scoffed at him. Then his eyes sharpened.
“The island,” he muttered.
“Yes. I lifted you from the hell where you had been deposited so you might be free to express yourself in the manner you deserved. I supplied you with the files you needed and cheered you every step of the way.”
“Who are you?”
“Who I am doesn’t matter, Garth Seckle. What matters is that you passed your test brilliantly. What you did in those towns, the hospital; what you would have done in that resort, if Kimberlain hadn’t disrupted you.”
Garth Seckle’s eyes filled with anger.
“Relax. You will have your opportunity to avenge yourself upon him. But he is meaningless to you and to us.”
